Sunday, March 3, 2019

Bidding frenzy

Mirka Moira, a much-loved Melbourne icon, passed away last year.

Today, the contents of her studio is being auctioned off. The prices for her works are going through the roof.

Take the example of this soft sculpture.

With an estimate of $3000-5000, it ended up selling for $62250.

As they say, at an auction, you only need two people who really want something to drive the price up. When the hammer finally came down, the entire room broke out in applause.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow. The gallery Heidi crowd funded and with its own money raised money to buy much of her work and I thought the auction would not go ahead. Do you know if it was all her work that was individually auctioned off or perhaps just some items the gallery did not want?

Adaptive Radiation said...

The gallery got a bunch of stuff beforehand as there were items on the online catalogue that were 'withdrawn' from sale. These were the rest. Two buyers clearly wanted this one piece really bad. It almost fetched as much as one of her major paintings. I think the 'icon' factor definitely drove up the prices. I've been to several of her exhibitions when she was still alive and while her paintings always sold well, I've never seen these kind of prices.

Adaptive Radiation said...

UPDATE: Just read an article in The Age. Looks like the gallery bought a few things before auction and then bought a few more at the auction.